Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Seeing that so many people have either a very small understanding of the Amendments or the purpose behind each Amendment, I feel it is necessary to discuss each one in detail. There's a lot more to understanding the Amendments than to simply be able to recite them. A big part of understanding an Amendment is to understand the times they were written in as well as the feelings and intentions of the founding fathers that authored the Bill of Rights.

Amendment The First:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

There's a lot more than just freedom of speech here folks. The first thing it speaks of is the subject of religion. Keep in mind the original people to come here to the New World were people seeking freedom from religious persecution. The Old World was all White so segregation took a religious form. If you weren't of a particular religion, you were cast out or persecuted or worse. Needless to say, our founding fathers didn't want people to feel oppressed because of their religious views. The First Amendment doesn't allow Congress to prefer one religion over another. Now some take this to be a "Christians-first" type of law but really it's a ten foot pole rule. In other words, this Amendment basically says "Congress isn't to touch religious issues with a ten foot pole." So that means whatever cards are on the table are the cards that are there and Congress isn't supposed to alter that at all, neither in favor or against a particular religion.

Freedom of speech is the next big thing here. Not too many people disagree with that in general. However, many people seek to silence others simply because they don't agree with the speaker's opinion. Many people tend to amend freedom of speech in their minds to simply say "freedom of speech unless I don't agree with you". People seem most worried that someone who is speaking favorably of an unpopular view might actually get listeners and then what? Sorry, but all speech is free, even the most vile. People can make up their own mind about who to follow. Also, I want to point one great screw-up of the government when the US Supreme Court decided that public safety supersedes free speech. The upheld view was that someone couldn't falsely shout "fire" in a crowded theater because of the risk to public safety. I don't buy that logic. What's the worse that could happen, forty people get trampled to death? Not good enough. Any strike against free speech has the potential to kill the freedom of the entire nation. That's worth more than even a million lives. Public safety be damned!

Freedom of the press. For the most part, our press gets quite a bit of freedom and they have all the lawyers they'll ever need to keep it that way. The internet further ensures this, so long as our government keeps its damn hands off the internet. I've got a sounding board right here and that is a benefit of the First Amendment.

The right of the people to peaceably assemble. Ahhh, yes, the right to protest, rally, etc., so long as we do it nicely. Riots and such are not the ways to demonstrate and some people can't seem to get that through their heads. I love the "Tea Parties" we've been having this year. In many other nations, they'd be driving over us with tanks. If you don't agree with the people assembling, then by all means counter-protest, but don't get violent or try to attack, it only makes martyrs out of the people you seek to vilify. While the restriction is placed against the government in this case, the good patriotic citizen will realize that they too should abstain from breaking up other people's protests through oppressive means.

Petition the Government for a redress of grievances. This means that individuals should be able to access their representatives, and be able to have their say directly before the Government. So if I have a beef with the government I should always have the right to complain to the Government. More importantly, they should listen. That's the forgotten part. A government that listens. What a novel concept.

Be patriotic, folks. Live the words of the Constitution. It's not just about what's best for you, its about what's best for the nation. I've quite often felt that we would be better off if we did this or that or the other thing. However, in the end, I come back to my senses and think What Would Our Founding Fathers Do? We could have chosen a lot of ideals to incorporate into our nation but we didn't and for good reason. Our founding fathers didn't want socialism. They didn't want communism. Think about what you want for us as a nation and then think about whether that desire is in line with our founding fathers. If it isn't, then perhaps its time to humble oneself and realize the best thing for our nation was written on parchment hundreds of years ago.

Tune in next time for The Second Amendment. That will likely be my favorite and it just might shock you.

Monday, December 21, 2009

There's some bad news out there right now. Seems the test vote to pass the health care bill has passed. Real vote is going to go through on Christmas Eve. I really don't trust the politicians when they meet at 1am in the morning or when they plan to vote on a bill on Christmas Eve. We've had nothing but bad legislation around the holidays. For example, the Federal Reserve Act was passed on 12/23/1913. Socialized medicine creates nothing but sick people. Most people just tough out their illnesses but now they'll be crowding the hospital every time they sneeze.

They are also talking about having fines for not getting medical insurance if you can afford it. They equate it to mandatory automobile insurance. Problem is, mandatory automobile insurance isn't all that mandatory. If I feel like not having auto insurance, I can simply choose not to own a car and not to drive. However, you don't have that luxury with your body. How do you choose not to have a body anymore? You could probably take a dirt nap. Its a tax on living. Exactly that. If you're alive, you are going to pay for health care, pay for fines, resign yourself to a life of poverty, or check out permanently. How is that a benefit? Laws that force people to reach into their pocket against their wills are bad laws, plain and simple.

We could never make an outright conversion to Communism in this country. However, if we keep legislating a money-grab into people's pockets a few dollars at a time and then redistributing through plans such as these, we'll have our welfare state soon enough.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

It seems that Tiger Woods is ducking media coverage in an attempt to get his affairs in order, or is that order more affairs, I forget. Anyways, while the rest of the world anxiously awaits the next events in the PGA champ turned living soap opera that is the Tiger, I've been watching the Dragon. Dragon, of course, being the magical serpent that is Obama. Seems he's a-headin' to Copenhagen. Probably not a bad move after sending 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. "I'll just hide over here and let Tiger's infidelity take the limelight, no one cares about climate issues to pay attention to me here." A search on Yahoo News for "Obama" has nothing but climate-related issues for about two pages. Won't be long before everyone forgets that Mister "Let's end the war" has just ramped things up. I don't know if I'm more upset that people have practically forgotten how the two-headed dragon promised an end to these wars or that he has the audacity to send more troops over there.

Why do we feel the need to prop up every nation we have fought with over the years? It's not like they are ever going to like us. We're certainly not going to break even by creating some kind of lucrative trade agreement where we make back more than we spent on war budgeting. I think the whole reason we're still there is because we can't figure out a way to leave that doesn't have us looking like cowards that ran from the fight. So what! Since there's going to be 30,000 more troops there now, lets just do a big offensive, and then just withdraw overnight. Vanish like a fart in the wind. We'll leave them a note that says "Sorry we didn't stick around to play but the truth is we got bored here. You guys might like sex with goats and all that, but we're going home to have a beer, have sex with our wives, and watch online porn and cartoons of foul-mouthed kids from Colorado. We do crap like that because we're free and that's why freedom rules. Enjoy your goats, Afghanistan. -Love, USA"

Next time some nation wants to screw with us, lets just drop an A-bomb. August 6th, 1945 we bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki three days later. Six days afterwards, Japan announced it was surrendering. That's like fight on Monday, home by Friday kind of warfare. That should be our war policy from now on. Drop two bombs and let them call us in the morning. Don't think I'm a warmonger for thinking like this. I'm quite the opposite. We should just be the quiet guy in high school that no bully wants to fight because everyone saw him lay someone out with a fierce punch.

Monday, December 14, 2009

By now you're probably beginning to understand the basics of "Fractional Reserve Lending" where the businessman only has a fraction of the money he has lent out. He has created money that doesn't exist. When we started this story, there was only $100,000 in the businessman's storage but now he is lending a lot more than that. Even more importantly, he's only lending out paper that is worth only a fraction of its face value. Furthermore, by lending out so much money but having people paying actual debt, the flow of real wealth is going to the businessman. With real wealth comes real power, and our businessman loves power. In fact, he now has the power (money) to influence the politicians of the nation.

What can the businessman do with that kind of power?

Convince the government to borrow money from him. Think about that for a minute. The businessman now controls all the money in the nation's economy. When the government decides more money is needed, it has to borrow it from the businessman. If you challenge the businessman, you lose. Either you are cast as a lunatic if you name him for the thief that he is or perhaps worse. The businessman has that kind of power. It is why when this nation is in trouble, the answer is conveniently to get another loan and spend more money. The loan will never go away though, it will have to be paid eventually...unless you dissolve the "assets" of the businessman. Our nation has to get away from the businessman. We have to get away from the Federal Reserve Bank.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Let's imagine for a few moments that we have a nation that doesn't have banks and doesn't have paper money but instead uses gold coins, etc., for real money in all transactions. Now imagine you have $2,000 in gold coins but no safe place to keep them. A businessman offers to store the coins for you in his secure safe and will only charge you $5 a month for storage fees. Seems pretty fair, you are paying for a service and he's making a little money providing that service. He gives you a receipt so that you can show that he owes you the money if you decide to take it back later on.

Well, word gets out that he provides this service and eventually he has quite a few clients, totaling about 100 people in all and the deposits altogether add up to $100,000 that he is holding. He's charging them each $5, so that's $500 a month, not bad. Or is it...

Enter Dave. Dave doesn't have money to deposit but in fact, has the opposite. Dave needs money to buy a horse. Dave goes to the businessman and asks if he can borrow $2,000 and pay him back over time. The businessman, seeing all the money he's holding, decides he can lend Dave the money. The agreement though is that Dave will pay $200 a month for 12 months, totaling a $2,400 repayment.

Now when you hear about this you become upset because you think the businessman has just given your $2,000 to someone else. You demand your money back. The businessman obliges and gives you your $2,000 in gold coins right there on the spot. Realizing that it isn't your money that he lent out, you feel safe again and re-deposit the money.

After a short while, the businessman realizes that in any given month, his depositors will only transact a few thousand in gold coins a month. The other $90,000 or so doesn't ever really move. It's just sitting there, in his storage. He figures he can safely loan out about $50,000 of it without ever running the risk of everyone demanding their money all at once. Then something unusual happens. The people borrowing money don't want to take the actual gold coins out of storage. They prefer instead to just get paper receipts that they can give to local stores, etc., instead and the stores can come get the gold coins themselves with the paper receipts. Pretty soon everyone is buying goods and services using these paper receipts instead of gold coins. Everyone trusts the paper receipts because they know the businessman has the money in storage to pay the receipt. They trust him. The businessman is happy because he continues to make storage fees and loan interest. So the money is gradually moving from storage into his own pockets.

You didn't think we would end the story there, did you? The plot thickens as the businessman realizes that if he can just give out paper receipts every time someone wanted to borrow money and that so few of the paper receipts come back at any given time he can loan out a lot more paper. He only needs a fraction of gold in his storage for all the paper receipts he "loans" out.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Well, it appears that our government is reaching new lows again. Our founding fathers would probably hang themselves than to have any part of our government today. The House of misRepresentatives passed legislation to really take control over private enterprise. The intent is to govern every aspect of financial based businesses, whether it be a payday loan place or a small local bank or the largest financial firms in the nation. That's a whole lot of government hands tinkering with free enterprise. Uncle Sam will even have the power to dismantle a large corporation that is healthy but simply too big to be considered "safe" in our economy. Now, I hate big businesses just as much as the next guy. I applaud them for their tenacity to self-manage themselves to the level of success they've achieve. My hostility is more towards them using their weight to try and disrupt competition by methods not becoming of a true free economy business. Benevolence is never their key trait.

Communism and capitalism can be near the same thing. A bloated government that dictates every aspect of our lives isn't any different than a swollen corporation that does the same by using a government as it's proxy. "Buy 'N' Large. Your very best friend." The kids' movie 'Wall-E' may not be all that far off in its depiction of a future America's governance. Preventing monopolies is something that has to be handled carefully. On one hand as a government you have to leave private enterprise alone, but on the other hand you have to ensure all the players have a fair shot at the game. This legislation is not regulation though, it is socialism. It is the government taking a huge controlling interest in private enterprise.

This is not a good thing to have the government in so much control. It's like being thirty and having your parents move in and take over your life again even though you've been doing fine on your own.